For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I’ve put together a feed of this site in iCalendar format (as used most notably by Apple’s iCal).
This is another one to be filed under “because I can”, but having blog post summaries appear in the calendar is well, interesting. Taken a step further, iCal could become a simple news aggregation tool that gives a more natural view of blog updates in relation to eachother.
The iCalendar file, and the source code for the index template are available. iCal users can subscribe using the webcal:// protocol by using this link.
There’s a few issues to be aware of if you feel like taking this further:
- Timezones
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Timezones are hard-coded, as there’s no support in MT to write out “GMT“, or “Europe/London” as might be expected.
- Appointment length
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All the ‘appointments’ are one-minute long.
- Line length
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The summaries and descriptions tag as per the spec should wrap at 75 octets in length; however, I’ve not figured out a decent way to do this in MT. A plug-in might help here.
- MovableType support
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The template requires MT 2.66 or higher (I think), as I used some of the new tags required for Atom support (in particular
<MTIfNonEmpty>and<$MTEntryModifiedDate$>).
forgive my “unknowingness” but, how does this work – the ical thing – I am looking for an MT plugin that will act as a sidebar thingy for a calendar of events, to do list or something like that because I have a wierd work schedule and everyone always asks me when I am working or what I am doing – just thought it would be a good thing to have.
thanks.